Quizzing in Derbyshire for over Three Decades

On 6 March 2010, the Guardian included this correction: “On the page of news briefs, a small photo purported to show ‘Lady Gaga, wearing a jewel-encrusted lobster on her head’. A reader notes: ‘She is wearing a crayfish.’”

“Giggling troll follows Clancy, Larry, Billy and Peggy who howl, wrongly disturbing a place in Wales (58)” is an anagram of “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”. It appeared as a crossword clue in the The Telford and Wrekin News in 1979, devised by Roger Squires.

John Alexander Brodie invented both the football goal net and the pre-fab. On a much larger scale, he was the civil engineer responsible for the construction of the Mersey Tunnel, and had worked with Lutyens on the planning of New Delhi.

Most humans have more than the average number of legs.

Stenhousemuir are the only British football team to be named after a Roman monument. Not that any members of the club could ever have seen it: the stone house, Arthur’s O’on, was demolished to re-use its materials in 1746.

RAF Bomber crew suffered greater losses in World War Two than Japanese Kamikaze flyers. The RAF had an RoA (Rate of Attrition) of approximately 65% against the Kamikazes’s 53% or so. Many Kamikaze pilots survived (as did their Luftwaffe colleagues) because in the last years of the War the Axis powers were deprived of fuel. Ironically, the successes of tankers such as the San Demetrio empowered the RAF crews to be sent to their deaths.

The numbering of the B vitamins has something in common with the house numbering in Downing Street: inconsistency. The B vitamins begin with B1, thiamine, and end with B12, cyanocobalamin, but there are not twelve of them: numbers 4, 8, 10 and 11 having been found not to be vitamins or not to belong to the B group. This has not stopped more outlandish claims being made, up to a vitamin B22, aloe vera juice.

In 1801 close to every European monarch was insane, including those of Britain (George III), Russia (Paul I), Portugal (Maria), Denmark (Christian VII) and Sweden (Gustav IV Adolf). The other countries of Europe were ruled by Napoleon Buonaparte or his relatives, each of whom was sane but had taken Europe into a war that would continue to devastate the continent for another fourteeen years.

Count from one to one-hundred and you will never use the letter “A”. You don’t need it until you reach one-hundred-and-one.

It is sometimes said that the word “typewriter” is the longest word that can be spelled using the top row of a QWERTY keyboard, but that is not true for perpetuity.

When the US Sixth Fleet started visiting Barcelona in 1951 there were so few native English speakers on one side, and so few Spanish – let alone Catalan – speakers on the visiting side, that such conversations as were held had to be made in Latin.

The original Bethlehem Hospital in London (“Bedlam”) became the Imperial War Museum. Its second location became Liverpool Street Station.

Learning Japanese? Be careful not confuse ‘yakuza’ and ‘yakazu’ – the first are gangsters, the second is a poetry convention.

Great Britain had a worse record in the 2012 Olympics than any other nation. Team GB finished in the bottom three 31 times. Their nearest rivals, Ukraine and Australia, only managed 23 and 20 times respectively. The table revealing the British explication of the desire to take part rather than win was drawn up by Americans for reasons that remain unclear.

Lobster claws are different sizes because they have different functions: one cuts, and the other crushes.

The lowest number that requires three words to write it is twenty one thousand.

Like T. S. Eliot’s cats, Derby has had three different names. To the Romans it was Derbentione or Derventio; to the Anglo-Saxons it was Northworthige, which we would read as Northworthy; finally the Danes called it Deoraby. Our knowledge of all three names is from records written in latin.

Girolamo Fracastoro had already become the first person to describe syphilis (in 1530) when he became chief physician to the Council of Trent (1545 -1563). However, he had only only been in the job for one year when he published the first description of Typhus in 1546.

The only character in The Wind In The Willows with a Christian, or first, name occurs in the only pagan chapter of the novel.

Neville Chamberlain, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, began his radio broadcast to the nation announcing the outbreak of war at 11:14am on September 3rd 1939, fourteen minutes after the deadline given to the Nazis to recall their troops from Poland. Only thirty-eight minutes later, at 11:52, HMS Walpole carried out the Royal Navy’s first depth-charge attack against a suspected submarine in the St George’s Channel. Encouraged by a good ASDIC contact, they were disappointed to find they had a bombed a shoal of fish.

Returned as an MP in 2012, George Galloway pointed out that the last member before him to be returned for three seats and in two countries was Winston Churchill. Galloway was born in Dundee, Churchill’s one-time constituency.

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was the ancestor of the Royal Houses of York, and of Lancaster, and of Tudor. Due to his landholdings he has been estimated to have been among the twenty wealthiest men of all time (adjusted for inflation) when he died in 1399 in Leicester Castle. Richard III, the last Yorkist monarch, died in or near the same place eighty-six years later. Sic transit soaria mundi.

When he died in 1937 John D Rockefeller had a fortune equivalent to one sixty-fifth of the US Gross Domestic Product (that is, of every sixty five dollars in the USA, one of them belonged to John D.). By comparison, Bill Gates’ current fortune means he possesses only one dollar in every one hundred and fifty-two.

Implicit in Isiaih 11:6, and restated in Isiaih 66:25, is the reunion of shepherds and their dogs in heaven, but many pet owners believe that that promise can be extended to all dogs, if not all pets. Unfortunately, as the carnivores will become vegetarian, but feed on straw (Isiaih 11:7), which has only a quarter of the protein content of hay – 4% versus 16%, the dogs will not have as much time to play as they had in this life, as they will have to spend longer eating to maintain their metabolic requirements.

The Archbishop of Canterbury never attends the November Act of Remembrance at The Cenotaph.

Greensted Church, in Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex is the oldest wooden church in the world. Due to the paradox known as the Ship Of Theseus it is the oldest wooden building in Europe.

The paradox known as the Ship Of Theseus to philosophers is exemplified in the carpenter’s boast: this has been a real good hammer to me, it’s only had one new head and two new shafts in all the time I’ve owned it.

The last film seen by US President John F Kennedy, on November 20th 1963, at the White House in Washington DC, was the new film adaptation of his favourite novel, From Russia With Love.

The name-tag was introduced by Lady Nancy Astor, originally to identify all the guests at her infamous pre-war Cliveden parties. As an MP she was responsible for the Intoxicating Liquor (Sales to Persons Under 18) Act, perhaps responsible for the lack of long-term teenage participation in our League.

Nowhere in the British Isles is there a placename beginning with “X”. Of the six that begin with “Z”, five are in the south-west; the sixth is so well known as not to be worth mentioning.

When asked to name Britain’s worst winters, 1683/84, 1739/40, 1813/14 and 1962/63 would be good bets. The first and second were followed by popular rebellions, while the fourth was soon followed by politcal change. Repressive laws, introduced by the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, prevented protest after 1814.

The trail of scent left by a perfume is called sillage. The term might even apply to the “gardenia perfume lingering on a pillow” mentioned in the song These Foolish Things.

Arthur Lowe, who was born in Hayfield, Derbyshire, had a clause in his contracts for the TV series and film of Dad’s Army stating that he was not to be seen without his trousers. All other members of the platoon are seen in their longjohns. This concern with the contents of his pants extended to the episode “The Deadly Attachment”, where the script had to be altered so that Jones rather than Mainwaring is threatened by a Mills Bomb inside his uniform.

The ability to smell the “bitter almonds” of cyanide varies by sex: only one in two men inherit this sense. This specific anosmia has been suggested as responsible for the death of Alan Turing.

For the first sixty-odd years of the 100 Years War negotiations between the English and French were carried on in the French language, but by 1404 the ability of the French to use their own language had so deteriorated that all negotiation thereafter was made in Latin. Fifty years later (the 100 Years War lasted longer than its name suggests) the outbreak of Wars Of The Roses meant the English no longer had to cross the Channel if they wanted to fight and the French, in effect, won. The fact that after English victories at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the French had started to win at battles such as Castillon (1451 where their firearms beat the English longbows) had nothing to do with it, of course. Hence the frequency with which Castillon stations are found across the British railway system.

Want to know whether an Oxbridge educated comedian was specifically educated at Oxford or Cambridge? Go by height: Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Stephen Fry and Graham Chapman, all closer to two metres than two yards tall, were all educated on the Granta. Six footers such as Rowan Atkinson, through Terry Jones, down to Dudley Moore (five foot something) on the Cherwell.

Bradbourne is Derbyshire’s only ‘Thankful Village’ – one to which all those who had left to serve in the First World War returned in the same number. The phrase ‘Thankful Village’ was popularised in the 1930’s by local man, Arthur Mee (born just across the Erewash in Stapleford). When Mee tried to count such places he found only 32, despite more detailed study since then that number has increased only to 52. There are four in Nottinghamshire and two in Leicestershire, but none in Staffordshire.

If you see a motor car without number plates and you do not recognise the person inside as the reigning monarch then it must be the vehicle of the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Or a criminal.

No American astronaut who set foot on the moon had an older brother.

Using two letter prefixes such as “DE” there are a potential 676 main postcodes, but the Post Office only uses about 120 of them. The most remote is “BIQQ 1ZZ”, which covers the British Antarctic Territory.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (first serialised 1901-1902) has fifteen chapters. The solution is given in the last sentence of the second chapter, though most readers do not realise its significance and carry on reading.

World War Two did not end in Ireland until 1976. Upon the outbreak of war the Irish Government passed The Emergency Powers Act on September 3rd 1939. Ireland remained neutral during the following six years of conflict, but the legislation was not repealed until September 1st, thirty seven years later.

Would you know the meaning of the word ‘anterotesis’ if you saw it? What if I told you that it meant answering one questions with another?

Italy declared war on Japan on July 14th, 1945. Never having signed a peace treaty, the two countries are theoretically still at war.

One centimeter per minute is equivalent to one furlong per fortnight. The rational alternative to the MKS (Metre/Kilogram/Second) system is the FFF (Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight), which makes it easier to comprehend any area the size of Wales or item the size or weight of a double-decker bus. Many countries in the world are held back from the adoption of the FFF system by their lack of Wales or double-decker buses.

The word “hallelujah” occurs 56 times in Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”. The piece takes about three and a half minutes to perform, meaning the word occurs once every four seconds or thereabouts on average.

The Food (Jelly Mini-Cups) (Emergency Control) (England) Regulations 2009 have been revoked by The Food (Jelly Mini-Cups) (Emergency Control) (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2011. The revoking regulation may contain more parentheses in its name than any previous piece of legislation in England, but still contain only two thirds of the parentheses found in The Food Protection (Emergency Prohibitions) (Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning) (West Coast) (No. 4) (Scotland) Partial Revocation (No. 2) Order 2002.

Seaborgium (element 106) is the only element to be named after a living person (in this case Glenn Seaborg). IUPAC rules mean this will never occur again.

British weather from year to year is measured on the “CET”, the Central England Temperature, a rating system which dates back to 1659. No “coldest” record in England has been broken since 1947, but every “warmest or hottest” record has been set since I matriculated and most of them in the Twenty-First century.

Raymond Chandler coined the phrase “Private Eye” in a story published in June 1938 in Dime Detective Magazine.

Christianity arrived on the Isle of Wight in 685, when Christian Jutes arrived, exterminated the residents and took their place. From this time on the whole of England could be said to be Christian.

BBC Radio Derby’s claim to cover Derbyshire and East Staffordshire means that its audience area includes both the site of Britain’s last Hanging, Drawing and Quartering (of Jeremiah Brandreth and two others of the Pentrich Uprising, who were drawn from Derby Gaol to the the street outside the Buck In The Park public house, where they were executed) in 1817, and of Britain’s last burning at the stake (of Edward Wightman of Burton-on-Trent who was burned at the stake, for heresy, in Lichfield market place in 1612). Derby Gaol saw its last hanging on St Helier’s Day, July 16th, 1907 – of William Slack who had been convicted of murdering Lucy Wilson; Derby’s last public hanging had taken place only forty-five years earlier in 1862, when Richard Thorley who had been convicted of murdering Eliza Morrow was given the short drop outside Vernon Street Prison.

Only one British railway station has ever been stolen. Fortunately for travellers, Cleakheaton Central station had been closed for some years when it was stolen in 1971. However, had the suspect removed the station between its closure in 1965 and the end of 1967 it is unlikely he could have been prosecuted, as it was under a clause of the 1968 Theft Act that he was eventually brought to trial. The defendant was eventually found not guilty, having been the unwilling dupe of the true criminals. On the other hand, their removing and clearing a railway station surely shows intent to deprive of permanent possession?

During the US Civil War, the northern army had two generals with the same unusual middle name: William Tecumseh Sherman and Napoleon Joseph Tecumseh Dana. The original Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, protected Canada from invasion by its southern neighbour during the War of 1812.

John Snow, the physician who first realised how cholera was spread through infected water, was also an early expert in anaesthesia (using chloroform at the birth of Queen Victoria’s last two children), and an early dietician who recognised that adulteration of food was a cause of rickets. Rickets, although usually caused by Vitamin D deficiency, can be caused by deficiencies of phosphorus or calcium. As bread was a major part of both working and middle-class diets in the nineteenth century, adulterated bread was a serious threat to health.

The disused Cleakheaton Central station should not be confused with the disused Chorlton-cum-Hardy railway station which was taken over on August 19th 1964 by Granada Television for a rhythm and blues concert, most famously featuring Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing ‘Let It Rain’ on electric guitar. Film suggests it did rain.

Chorlton-cum-Hardy is mentioned in Flanders and Swan’s ‘Slow Train’, their tribute to stations under threat of the Beeching Axe in 1963. The lyric also mentions more stations in the purview of the DPQL: specifically, Ambergate, Pye Hill and Somercotes, Millers Dale for Tideswell, and Kirby Muxloe. Did any of our older members pass through Mumby Road on their to Mablethorpe?

Conan Doyle, though not the most consistent of writers (he gave Sherlock Holmes two different housekeepers, for instance), did manage to keep Holmes living at the same address: 221b Baker Street. By contract, Rex Stout located his detective Nero Wolfe’s home at 502, 509, 618, 909, 914, 918, 919, 922, 924, and 938 West 35th Street, New York, but never all at the same time.

While the name Amanda is often abbreviated to Mandy, Mandy may also be a diminutive of Miranda.

Allegedly an advanced nation, Australia is also one of the most unequal: three quarters of the population earn less than than the average wage.

Based on surnames Dutch bakers were more fertile than their British or German equivalents. The names Smith and Schmidt are more popular than Baker or Becker in England and Germany, but the reverse is true in the Netherlands.

While Britain has 52 ‘Thankful Villages’, where all who had served in WWI returned to their homes, France (which suffered even more losses than Britain) may have only one, Thierville in Normandy.

Germans do not use a literal translation of “goose step” for their favourite mode of locomotion, as the word Gänsemarsch is used to refer to walking in single file there.

The first interracial kiss on UK television was in Emergency Ward 10, in an episode written by Hazel Adair. The first on US television was between Kirk and Uhura on Star Trek, though that episode was not shown on British TV at the time.

There are three words beginning with ‘dw’ in everyday English: dwarf, dwell and dwindle.

There are only three coloured metals: copper, gold and caesium. Osmium may appear coloured but is not.

There are two United States in north America – the United States of America and the United States of Mexico. There has been only one United States in Europe – a short lived United States of Belgium in the nineteenth century. Had he not been assasinated at Sarajevo, the Arch-Duke Ferdinand upon his succession to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have encouraged the country to re-organise itself as a United States of Austria.

Of the six General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviert Union, only the last (Mikhail Gorbachev) was born after the Russian Revolution.

The “bergamot” which flavours Earl Grey tea is not a herb, but an orange-like fruit.

The abbreviation “R & D”, meaning research and development, was first used in the 1953 science fiction novel The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. That novel was also the first to use “survey” meaning the conduct of an opinion poll and it also introduced the use of “muzak” as a generic condemnatory term for a style of music.

At the funeral of poet Dylan Thomas, fellow poet Louis MacNeice was so drunk that when he thought he was throwing his wreath into the grave he threw his packet of sandwiches instead.

Margate in Kent was Britain’s first sea-side resort to offer donkey rides on the beach and to offer deck-chairs.

A hamlet lacks a church, a village lacks a market, and a town lacks a cathedral. Traditionally, a city had all three.

The phrase “Cold War” was first used by George Orwell.

United Kingdom and Czech Republic excepted, all countries of the European Union have one word names.

“Roundabout”, the name used in Britain for a rotary road junction, was coined by Bertrand Russell’s American brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith.

Though we tend to think of England as a country of church spires spied through the trees, in fact such churches are only found in a diagonal belt of the country running from Lincolnshire to Somerset, above the band of oolitic limestone which could be easily quarried and manipulated.

‘Twerp’ is an eponym, a word derived from someone’s name. J R R Tolkien was a fellow student of T. W. Earp.

The official currency of Ecuador and El Salvador is the US Dollar; that of Tuvalu is the Australian Dollar.

The USA has a military presence in 156 countries, but the number of those military bases is less certain. It is somewhere between 700 and 800.

While ‘defenestration’ is the act of throwing someone out of a window, ‘fenestration’ involves making a hole in something. Hard contact lenses may be fenestrated to ensure oxygen reaches the surface of the eye.

Argentina has the credit for two historical firsts: in 1891 Juan Vusetich introduced forensic fingerprinting, while in 1922 an Argentine station broadcast the first radio commercial (for Los Andes Restaurant).

The United States Postal Service registered “Pony Express” as a trade mark in June 2006 even though the Pony Express had ceased running in October 1861, after only eighteen months of business.

What is popularly called “The Plate” or the “Consolation Cup” is named The Derbyshire Pub Quiz League Plate in Memory of Richard Kendall in full. Richard played for the Stainsby team which later moved to the Traveller’s Rest at Kilburn. He died unfortunately young.

Although the standard unit of human attractiveness is the Helen, the millihelen is sufficient for everyday use, beauty capable of launching even one ship being so rarely encountered.

Apart from Hawaii, which has no borders, every other state of the USA has at least one straight border.

Of Britain’s five “Miss World” winers, three came from Dorset, and two of those from Poole (Ann Sidney in 1964 and Sarah-Jane Hutt in 1983). The title moved from Poole along the Dorset coast to Weymouth in 1964 when it was won by Lesley Langley.

Victor Grayson was the only Socialist to be elected as a Member of Parliament.

The backbone of England, the Pennine hills, did not exist until 1822 when William Daniel Conybeare and William Phillips used the the name in their Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales. The hills had previously been regarded as separate ranges.

The first British soldier to be wounded in the Second World War was shot only four and a half hours after Chamberlain’s broadcast on Sept 3rd, 1939. The unnamed soldier was a Territorial, shot in the stomach and seriously wounded. His attackers, in Belfast, were IRA men.

The first ring road in the United Kingdom was Queens Drive in Liverpool, completed in 1927. Brian Epstein was still living at home with his parents at Number 197 when he met The Beatles in 1961.

Eleanor Farjeon had to write “Praise for the sweetness Of the wet garden” in her 1931 song Morning Has Broken using two lines and eight words because researchers I J Bear and R G Thomas did not invent the word “petrichor” for the same thing until their seminal paper “Nature of argillaceous odour” in Nature in 1964. Given that “ichor” is the fluid which replaces blood in the veins of a Greek god, Ms Farjeon may not have used it anyway, as Morning Has Broken was written for the second edition of Percy Dearmer’s hymnal Songs Of Praise, and such a term might have stretched the bounds of ecumenicalism.

The BBC Radio Derby Inn Quiz, in which many DPQL teams participated, had its origins in a more informal league run by Frank Sanders and his colleagues within Derby’s Rolls-Royce aviation works.

Since the return of Gordon Cooper in May 1963, no American has gone into space alone.

The poet John Milton knew the Hobson, who gave us the phrase “Hobson’s choice” meaning no choice at all. Hobson rented horses in Cambridge while Milton was a student at the university. Shortly after graduating Milton, while on a tour of Italy, met the astronomer Galileo.

An automorphic number is a number whose square ends in the same digits as the number itself. While 1, 5, 6 can be recognised quickly, the only two digit automorphic numbers are 25 and 76. Apart from 1, it follows that all automorphic numbers end in either 5 or 6.

D.H. Lawrence called Ilkeston in Derbyshire “a town of idleness and lounging” despite his working there as a trainee teacher.

Although US Route 66 passed through 8 states, in his song lyric Bobby Troup completely omitted one of them in an act of near blatant Kansaphobia. That is not his only error. Later in the song Troup refers to Winona, Arizona out of geographical sequence, lying as it does to the east of Flagstaff, which precedes it in the lyric.

Winston S. Churchill used his middle initial for many years because an American author named Winston Churchill was already successful.

Amanda means “she who is worthy to be, or ought to be loved” and Miranda is “she who is worthy to be loved, or ought to be admired.” It is the nominative feminine singular of the gerundive mood imported direct from Latin.

For 250 years until 1549 – when it lost its spire – Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest building in the world. No building surpassed its height until the completion of Ulm Minster in 1890. Five buildings held the record inbetween yet, with only one exception, each was shorter than its predecessor.

During the Second World War, for every four men lost to the enemy US forces lost a fifth to accidents such as car and aircraft crashes, dropping artillery shells etc. The side-effects of mechanisation were that accidents replaced disease as a soldier’s alternative threat of death.

Scotland’s Grampian hills take their name from a printing error in a 1476 edition of Tacitus’s Agricola describing the battle of Mons Graupius. Not only is the site of the battle unknown, it is possible that there never was a battle at all.

The Solent, which separates the Isle of Wight from Hampshire, has a name which is pre-English, and is probably the only Phoenician word we have adopted.

The only battle fought by Canadian troops on Canadian soil was fought against the Fenian forces, forerunners of the IRA. Sometimes as many as 700 strong, the Fenian threat drove New Brunswick, previously an independent colony of the Crown, into union with the rest of Canada.

The Victorian critic Matthew Arnold died of a heart attack while running for a tram near Liverpool Docks in 1888. The science fiction writer Cyril Kornbluth died of a heart attack while running for a train near Levittown, New York state, in 1958. Leo Tolstoy was resting when he died in a railway station.

Norman Cross on the A1 near Peterborough was the site of Britain’s first Prisoner-of-War Camp, opened during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Much of the site now lies beneath the widened roadway and the memorial pillar itself had to be relocated. A more permanent Prisoner-of-War establishment was opened in 1806 elsewhere – we now know it as Dartmoor Prison. It features in its original condition in Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories, and in its punitive role in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

George Orwell coined the word “vaporise”.

The acnestis is that part of the body one cannot reach to scratch. More important than fire is to civilisation, the need to have one’s back scratched is the basis of all communal living.

Both leaders in the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were born in Kentucky.

Britain’s worst avalanche saw 8 people die when snow from the surrounding cliffs killed eight residents of Lewes in Sussex. This disaster on December 27 1836, would have been little known outside the town for months, as the country had been struck immobile by winter snows and fogs which began in October 1836 and did not end until April 1837.

Sir Isaac Newton received his knighthood for the political services of his later life, not for his scientific works.

Dave Tapsell of Wessington was the moving force in developing the DPQL from a league organised by a Yorkshire brewery.

US investors have calculated the number of prison places that will be required in fifteen years using an algorithm based on the number of illiterate ten year olds today.

“Jumbo” Edwards, a member of the 1926 Oxford Boat Race team, who collapsed during the race and was later discovered to have a hypertrophied heart, managed to overcome his problems and used his skills twenty years later, when his RAF aircraft crashed on water and he rowed a dinghy four miles through an Atlantic minefield.

The first man and second person to win a million pounds on ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? was DPQL area representative and question setter David Edwards.

‘Paparazzo’, the term for a near-criminal public photographer is a pseudo-eponym (as Paparazzo is the name of a character in the film La Dolce Vita rather than a real person). However, the name was taken in turn by the scriptwriter from Wakefield-born George Gissing’s 1901 travel book By The Ionian Sea. (Gissing’s life was unfortunate as he married an unredemable prostiture, for whom he even stole and suffered imprisonment, but his last wife was more unfortunate for him, as she and her mother basically starved him to death at their home in France. Gissing was unlucky with food – earlier in life, during a stay in the USA, he survived on a diet of peanuts and nothing else). Despite being given to an Italian character, ‘Paparazzo’ is of Greek origina and meant ‘priest-saddlemaker’ (given that speciality it is little wonder that Gissing found the name in only one town).

D.H. Lawrence’s family called him Bert, his writing friends called him David while Frieda, his wife, called him Lorenzo.

It is a popular myth that Stoke-on-Trent was not visited by the German Lutwaffe because reconaissance photographs showing the place as it was lead the interpreters to believe it had already been devasted. The city was bombed from the air in both First and Second World Wars with loss of life.

Walk around the coast and borders of the contiguous United States (“the lower 48”) and you will walk about 19973 miles. You will never have been more than 100 miles from two-thirds of the population of the USA.

When The Hound of the Baskervilles was first serialised in The Strand magazine in 1901 Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged his co-author, journalist Fletcher Robinson. After Robinson died five years later, and his name disappeared from the title page, gossip suggested that Doyle had been responsible for his death, unwilling to share the fame of Sherlock Holmes.

The nitrogen group (Group VA) is the only one in the periodic table that does not contain an element ending in “ium”.

Among his other introductions of rare sexual terms into literature, D H Lawrence was one of the first writers to use ‘making love’ to mean copulation. For the previous four hundred years it referred to courtship and flirting but somehow this abuse of an existing term failed to excite the prosecution when Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on trial in 1960.

According to the poet Philip Larkin sexual intercourse began “Between the end of the Chatterley ban And The Beatles first LP’. This long gestation can be exactly dated: the Chatterley ban ended on 2nd November 1960. The Beatles’ first LP was released on 22nd March 1963. Sexual Intercourse thus took two years five months to come to term (considerably longer than an elephant which requires only 22 months). However, in his poem Larkin specifically mentions “in 1963”, meaning it required no more than 79 days (longer than the average mink, but shorter than the average tiger).

The US Army expected so many casualties from an invasion of Japan that the Purple Heart medals made in preparation were so numerous that they have not been exhausted to this day, even after the Korean and Vietnam wars and the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite its name, St Paul’s First Epistle To The Corinthians is not the first he wrote to them.”I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators” says Paul in Chapter 5 Verse 9, where “an” indicates at least one previous letter sent to Corinth. Unfortunately, set theory was not developed until the 1890s by Georg Cantor, so that the Biblical fathers did not have access to a way of indicating an uncertain ordinal number in their titling. It is this verse that is the origin of the verb corinthicate, meaning to associate with sexual degenerates; something we in the DPQL cannot do without leaving the county, hence our more common awareness that Corinth also gave us the word “currant” meaning a small dried fruit.

How efficient is metereological prediction? Consider three major events predicated on the weather: D Day 1944, the Coronation of 1953, and the Diamond Jubilee flotilla of 2012. One in three. Fortunately, the correct one was also the most important as the later two would not have occurred had it failed.

‘Gaelic’ is an English word. The Gaelic word for ‘Gaelic’ is Gàidhlig.

Phileas Fogg, in Jules Verne’s Around The World In Eighty Days, makes his circumnavigation of the globe in seventy-nine days, not eighty. This can be explained by his or his author’s (mis)understanding of the word “in”, which they take to mean “within”. All that rushing would have been unnecessary if the French spoke better English.

All medicines are idiopathic – that is, their effect varies from person to person, sometimes not even working at all. There is one exception, fortunately:- everyone is knocked out by a general anaesthetic, though the required dose may vary.

It was a doctor – Arthur Conan Doyle – who first wrote “underground” when he meant London’s subterranean Metropolitan Railway. Only a few years later he invented the name “wonder-woman”.

The American psychologist William Moulton Marston was the co-inventor of the lie detector. He also created the cartoon character Wonder Woman. His belief that women are the superior race was possibly reinforced by the two women who lived with him.

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can*. I c’dnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabirgde Uinervtisy* , manes it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! *[allegedly. DPQL webmaster]